The Parisian audience famously rioted when Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes premiered Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) at the Theâtre des Champs-Elysees on May 29, 1913. Sacre represents an international convergence of modernist art, with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, designs and scenario by Nicholas Roerich, and music by Igor Stravinsky. One hundred years later, Sacre’s choreography of vernal consecration and sacrifice, its invocation of a pre-Christian Slavic past, and the music’s polyrhythmic energy continue to vibrate in dance performance and throughout this issue of Modernist Cultures. In spite of Sacre’s influence, the interdisciplinary innovation and artistic ferment that produced this and other remarkable dance performances have not been sufficiently explored – one symptom of the lack of exchange between modernist studies and dance studies even as both have flourished simultaneously in the past two decades. This special issue on ‘Modernism and Dance’ uses the centennial of Sacre as an occasion to encourage that conversation. By bringing into focus the often uncomfortable positions of dance in relation to modernist cultures, this issue presents a flexible, mobile, rather messy version of modernism. Definitions of modernism must stretch to accommodate dance, as dance highlights early twentiethcentury preoccupations with varieties of movement: motion and rhythm in performance and other arts, bodies transported on stages and across national, racial, and ethnic borders, movement-enabling technologies and the international markets that sold them, the passage between elite and popular cultures, and the (often imagined) new